Imperial Oil

As Norman Wells moves on from oil production, leaders are looking to future opportunities.

Imperial Oil ended production in August after more than a century in the town.

Sahtu MLA, Danny McNeely, says closure and remediation of that oil field marks a new chapter.

From the reclamation process, I hope to see a huge amount of opportunities and employment, and hopefully that'll contribute to the, uh, disposable economy, and maybe one day we might finally have a restaurant that we can dine in.

And a very similar process, you know, mailed out these letters, put the stamps on, get the bids in, and we ended up raising a lot more money than any expected.

And I did a couple more clients, and then we get this call from Imperial Oil.

Pure Oil says, geez, you know, we've seen what you've done for these companies.

Think you'd do that for us? And we said, we sure can.

And so this goes on for a while.

And we start, when you get quite a large informational advantage, when you know who all the buyers, you've seen all the bids, you know who all the activity is, it becomes this great flywheel.

So I then get a call from this guy at Imperial Oil, and he's got his buddy from Exxon on the line.

And he says, yeah, I've got Joe from Exxon's on the line here with me.

And one of the things that your work has brought up is that There were then, as there are no doubt now, people inside industry saying the same thing.

You referred to the chemical engineer from Imperial Oil years ago.

That was H.R. Holland, who was talking about harms and who also said, you know, this has to be regulated.

Industry isn't going to do this voluntarily.

So w- what happens with Carney now is he's gonna have to weigh things very carefully.

Right now, the senior business sector in Alberta, starting, let's say, with Imperial Oil, that sort of level, have started coming out clearly saying, "We've got so much going for us in Canada.

Let's not put that in peril." But what's missing is Mr.

Carney's voice in Alberta.

But the 30% number will really seize people's imagination.

Big corporations, responsible ones, ones with deep roots in that oil sector, like Imperial Oil, have come out.

and just said, well, we think we've got a lot to gain by staying in Canada.

And last week, several senior players signed a joint letter put together by the Chamber of Commerce.

They'd like to see the GST dropped, also the industrial carbon tax dropped, and yes, The Conservatives continue to call, they've been doing this over the last year or two already, referring to the clean fuel regulations as carbon tax 2.0 or the second carbon tax, and they continue to call for the scrapping of the clean fuel regulations, which again, it's somewhat a conundrum or a puzzling stance given how integral clean fuel regulations and mandates have been to the massive investment we've seen in canola processing, crush capacity in the prairie provinces.

We also have that Imperial Oil renewable diesel plant near Edmonton that is driven by some of this policy as well.

And so that's where if the clean fuel regulations are completely scrapped, what happens to that investment? Sure, there's still clean fuel standards that have to be met south of the border and massive demand south of the border in terms of renewable diesel exports.

But that's yeah, that's.

Yeah, Norman Wells, uh, they've been producing oil in that region.

Imperial Oil has been there since 1920.

So it's over 100 years that they've been producing there, and it's, uh, it's the, the heart of the, the economy in that region.

In the, uh, western part or eastern part of the territory, we've had diamond mines.